For me, any sensible discussion of Iran must accept a number of facts. I will set these out as Set A and Set B. Both sets are true. But ideologues of the right routinely discount Set A, while ideologues of the left routinely discount Set B. That is why most debate on Iran is inane.
Set A
Iranian Islamic fundamentalism allied to fierce anti-Americanism was born from CIA intervention to topple democracy and keep in power a ruthless murdering despot for decades, in the interests of US oil and gas companies
Iranian anti-Americanism was fuelled further by US support for US friend and ally Saddam Hussein who was armed to wage a murderous war against Iran, again in the hope of US access to Iran’s oil and gas
The US committed a terrible atrocity against civilians by shooting down an Iranian passenger jet
Iran is surrounded by US military forces and has been repeatedly threatened to the extent that the desire to develop a nuclear weapon is a reflex
There is monumental hypocrisy in condemning Iran’s nuclear programme while overlooking Israel’s nuclear weapons
Set B
Iran is governed by an appalling set of vicious theocratic nutters
Iran is not any kind of democracy. It fails the first hurdle of candidates being allowed to put forward meaningful alternatives
Hanging of gays, stoning of adulterers, floggings, censorship and pervasive control are not fine because of cultural relativism. Iran’s whole legislative basis is inimical to universal ideals of human rights.
Iran really is trying to develop a nuclear weapons programme, though with some years still to go.
There are two very good articles on the current situation in Iran. One from the ever excellent Juan Cole. I would accept his judgement on the elections being rigged.
http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/class-v-culture-wars-in-iranian.html#comments
The other from Yasamine Mather, which puts it in another perspective.
http://www.hopoi.org/articles/elections%20June%202009.html
I am not optimistic about the outcome of the popular protest.
technicolour,
So regarding Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran we’re the good guys are we?
Have you never heard the expression about removing the beam from your own eye before remarking on the mote in someone else’s?
The BNP objected to the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq too. This does not make them the “good guys”.
technicolour,
That’s so like eddie’s (non) logic….attacking a statement no one has made to prove your (non) point.
Are you eddie?
I was simply pointing out, anonymous poster, that several of the people attacking eddie sound far more horrible than he does. You brought up Afghanistan Iraq and Iran, for some reason (I presume you meant the attacks on them, rather than the geography). I then pointed out that being against these attacks does not necessarily make you a nice person, or “a good guy” (your words). Have you had breakfast yet?
technicolour,
Are you eddie?
Er, no, but then technically I am not technicolour either, you know, it is a pseudonym. I will not pre-suppose that you are the anonymous poster throwing around phrases like “vicious, ignorant, hate-filled little tub of Zionist shyte”, but would ask, do you think this kind of statement advances debate, or merely serves to relieve a person’s feelings, like a bowel movement? And don’t you think it’s curious that many of the people accusing eddie of being a troll whose purpose is to stir up hatred and cloud the issues, then release clouds of hatred and stir things up in their turn? I do.
technicolour,
the difficulty in dealing with eddie is a long standing refusal to accept the most persuasive of evidence. I accept that this does not justify the attacks – although he is never slow to respond and historically has a habit of getting his revenge in first.
If one was to suggest to eddie that the sun might rise in the east tomorrow morning he would doubtless deny such a thing could ever happen. This attitude frustrates people as does a habit of hiding behind moral equivalence as an argument – hence the growing desperation that gathers in opposing posters.
There are many occasions on this site where eddie has demanded a well sourced or definitive piece of evidence to prove him wrong and then deliberately ignored such responses, ducking and diving like an east end spiv. All add up to an atmosphere where people over-react and I think that is, for eddie, the point. I think it is extremely unfortunate because this attitude leads to the generation of more heat than light on topics that are often worthy of far greater consideration. All people ask is that eddie accepts the opinions of others (often sourced much more accurately than his own) as he expects his own contributions to be respected.
Yours, more in hope than expectation….
So Chris, leaving eddie aside for a second, the often vicious and vaguely homophobic abuse he’s getting is because
a) he deserves is/is actively asking for it
b) he’s often abusive first
c) the most viciously abusive posters are simply decent people inflamed and made desperate by his inability to agree with them.
I see.
Thanks to the anonymous poster who provided the reference to the piece, “Are You Ready For War With Demonized Iran?”. Very interesting. That the western media is so exercised about dodgy foreign ballot counts, and less so about dodgy domestic ballot counts, makes me truly unhappy. Aside from pockets of dissidents, most people seem enthralled to power and are taken in by the illusion of benign western government – despite the historical record. Mass apathy and a widespread lack of intellectual rigour may well help us to destroy the planet, if not ourselves too.
I received the following from Avaaz, a US-based centre-left pressure group inspired by MoveOn.org, leftist Democrats themselves. They’ve released some good alerts and petitions and I believe they’re not a front group! However they are also suspecting the election is a fraud, so just for yourselves:
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/iran_vote_truth/
If you believe that the uprising has nothing to do with CIA destabilisation, then feel free to donate. They are a good group, but I wonder whether they’ve got the balance on this one right.
Technicolour and anticant, thank you for your comments, I won’t call it support but at least you have recognised that the abuse I get is not good. Chris, I am quite happy to accept well sourced and objective information, what I won’t accept and never will accept is fantasies about conspiracies and dark forces (“the most persuasive of evidence”), and on this Craig is in agreement. Many of the “persuasive” bits of evidence that are thrown at me turn out to be nothing of the sort, instead they come from the murkier corners of the internet.
Nameless person (can’t you get that sorted?) with respect, the fact that you think technicolour could be me highlights your paranoia. Can’t you accept that someone who holds different views to you may wish to challenge and argue his case? Why on earth do you think spooks or agents would inhabit this remote corner of the internet? As for your heart bleeding for the fact that some Afghan girls not getting an education thay are also having acid thrown in their faces by the Taliban and I would remind you that the government of Afghanistan is democratically elected and that 30% of its MPs are women. I think that is worth standing up for, don’t you? Standing up against the REAL forces of darkness, the people who would like to take us back to the middle ages.
Returning to Iran, the violence is escalating and if these demonstrators are being paid by the CIA then many of them are paying with their lives and their freedom. The IT official in the Interior Ministry who leaked the real results has reportedly died in a suspicious car crash. If this isn’t nazism/stalinism I don’t know what is. What we are witnessing is a coup d’etat.
dear Eddie, I do quite like the way you insist that everything is OK in the West and the “dark forces” in Afghanistan, say, are no longer US stooges and spooks but the “Taliban”, for example. I think, however that whoever called this point of view Manichean had it right. The US created the Taliban. I was there while they were channeling millions of dollars a year into Hezb i Islami, whose leader (Gulbuddin Hekmatyar) had thrown acid into women’s faces himself. No-one, least of all the mujaheedin moderates, could understand it.
I think there’s very much a case for drawing a line under all this, and starting again with what is happening *now*, otherwise when will this ever end? Perhaps the US is now actively supporting people who believe in human rights, for example, rather than encouraging the worst psychos and killers to do their dirty work for them. And it does not mean that the Iranian protests, say, are invalid as a result. But I think it does behove us to have a certain sense of history before commenting.
Any time eddie is under fire, suddenly technicolour makes an appearance, and prances to defend eddie, on the same lines of imbeciles’ reasoning as eddie.
Fact that Guardian has written this and that makes it a true reflection of the realities apparently, based on the principles that anything printed on a bit of news print is true, and anything the nice BBC man says is true too!
The simple fact that what about millions of Palestinians whom have been incarcerated in an open air concentration camp, millions of Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, … . have been made into homeless refugees, by the very system that eddie, and his cohorts are constantly defending, and admonishing all and sundry whom ever strays from the path of pusillanimous, wanton, grovelling support of the same criminals whom have constituted such a criminal system and imposed it upon those unfortunates.
None of the above, matters to eddie, for he is all too concerned with sex, and its unusual forms. What eddie wants is all of us to be thinking about, is the poor little Gays, fact that there are millions more pressing issues such as five millions Iraqi refugees, whom have been left to fend for themselves without the slightest help from any quarters, is only incidental, all that matters to eddie is sex, and Gays, and so it matters to technicolour too.
This thread is about the hijack of an indigenous democracy by outside elements in collusion with the insider reactionaries in Iran. Fact that Hashemi Rafsanjani is sarcastically known as King Hashem the first, and derided for his notions of his state of health and wealth being directly correlated with the state of health and wealth of Iran!!! Ie if the king is happy then the country is happy too!!!!!!!
But hey that matters little to eddie the Zionist toady and his cohorts. All that matters to eddie is the very narrow and obtuse angle of what is in it for eddie? Never-mind millions of deaths, and millions more left starving, homeless, and destitute without any hopes of ever returning to their homes, all that is to be debated is; gays, and Israel, and the hypothetical, and possibly imaginary threats to these.
Fact is we the people have voted with our remote controls, and we no longer watch the bilge on the TV passed as news, we the people no longer buy the propaganda sheets, passed as the “print media”, hence the latest notions of the propaganda tax (BBC license fee) to be split among commercial and “independent” companies. As well as paying even more to trolls like eddie to come and mess up the boards for the benefit of whom?
No one is buying the propaganda shown on BBC that shows a bunch of Iranian students chanting a song, and then the commentators informs the audiences as; These students are shouting “death to dictator”. Fact that dictator is pronounced dictator in any language somehow does not matter, because the BBC person told us and we ought to believe her too! This is what eddie’s sponsors want, and wish for.
The audacity of these out of touch, and out of time sharp operatives is beyond the pale, for they truly believe that masses can eat cakes when faced with scarcity of bread, and expenses scrounging is legal as per rules that have been set in place, and Shah Hashem Rafsanjani the first is the best hope for Iran!!!!!
Yeah right eddie, technicolour, et al.
I haven’t insisted that everything is ok in the West. We are certainly far from perfect. What I have insisted, and will continue to insist, is that worse things are happening elsewhere. Talking about history, we all know that when people were protesting in Grosvenor Square in the sixties over Vietnam (bad) Mao was in the process of killing a total of 60 million people (very, very, very, very, very, very, very bad) yet no one in the West did a thing. So all I am saying is that the obsessing over the West/ Israel/ Gaza is missing the target, very, very bad things are happening around the world and we are complicit in our silence. Those who carry on about living here in a fascist state, to me, are like spoilt rich kids in a big house shouting “It’s so unfair!” when people are dying across the tracks. So that is what gets me worked up, and it is a legitimate point of view I believe.
As for the taliban, you have no evidence that they were “created” by the US. It is true that the West provided arms to those who were fighting the Soviets during the cold war, but to suggest that the US “created” an organisation that it knew would go on to deny human rights, maim, torture and kill in the way that it has is nonsense. You know perfectly well that throughout history governments have made policy on the basis that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, often with disastrous results.
“I am quite happy to accept well sourced and objective information, what I won’t accept and never will accept is fantasies about conspiracies and dark forces”
Come again? The first person on this thread to claim “conspiracies and dark forces” in respect of the Iranian election result was you eddie, and that was based on no sources whatsoever other than your own Islamophobic fantasies. Given that a professionally conducted poll prior to the election predicted a 2/3 majority for Ahmadinejad those fantasies appear to be somewhat off the mark as things currently stand.
When however eminently well-sourced and objective evidence was put to you regarding the discovery of active thermite particles in the dust from WTC you blew a gasket and made rather a fool of yourself.
Would you like to reconsider your self-assessment on this matter and get back to us with something a little more accurate?
VamanosBandidos,
“This thread is about the hijack of an indigenous democracy by outside elements in collusion with the insider reactionaries in Iran.”
Is it? I thought it was merely stating that you can’t have a sensible conversation about Iran unless you see both sides of the argument.
It really annoys me when people like you seem to think that because Iran opposes the US’s desperate need for dominance that they are a worthy government.
I’m no fan of our government or the US but i will never support a country that restricts the rights of people like Iran does.
I see supporting Iran in the same light as supporting the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe or the Junta in Burma or the Royal government of Saudi Arabia.
They’re all the same.
I think we are lucky that we can complain against our government without the fear of death when we believe that they are wrong and that our country accepts people for who they are not what they are. It’s a luxury that we should never forget.
By the way I’m not Technicolour or Eddie.
Eddie:
The West may not have completely created the Taliban but they allowed extremism take over when the Russian’s were defeated. As soon as the Russian’s had left they jumped ship too and left the country in ruins. They provided little or no support and were quite happy for the Taliban to take over.
The West were the main reason the Taliban were in power for so long in Afghanistan.
Chris, well said, and no you are not me. But the USA didn’t even “partially” create the taliban. The Taliban that we know is the one that took Afghanistan back to the middle ages, banned music and kite flying, stopped women working (and destroyed the health service at a stroke) on top of all its other atrocities. I don’t believe that you can say the USA created that. You say the USA “allowed” extremism to take over after the Soviets left? One minute you are slagging off the USA for interfering in other countries the next you are saying they should have intervened. Make your mind up! The West may have been a little “happy” early doors that the taliban brought order and stability after the chaos of warlordism, but they soon changed their mind once the enormities of taliban rule became apparent.
MJ I haven’t mentioned any fantasies – I have referred to well grounded suspicions that the election has been rigged and you will find that many commentators support that notion, especially as the regime is now clamp0ing down on all dissent and, allegedly, killing an expert who leaked the true results. You call me Islamophobic, but that is just a kneejerk mantra. But yes, I am anti all religions, especially those that interfere in civil life. Religion is for the head and the home and it should not intrude elsewhere.
Please don’t get me started on 911 again I beg you. The thermite argument is well rehearsed and it doesn’t have any credible backers (stands back and waits for the onslaught).
Eddie, you don’t understand: the US government of the time created the Taliban in Afghanistan, by openly funding the most hated and fanatical of all the warlords, in an attempt to prevent Russia regaining control. They had the choice of Ahmed Shah Massoud and instead they funded Hekmatyar. I was there. I saw it happening.
I know it seems naive, foolish, destructive, even, to choose to give millions to a man who hated Westerners, and threw acid in women’s faces. And, as I say, no-one could understand it at the time. But that, encouraged by the CIA and ISI, is what the US did. Perhaps, as you say, the logic was ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ – with the proviso that you choose the most violent and vicious ‘friend’ available to increase your chances.
I have sympathy for your view that screaming about a fascist state is the privilege of a relatively lucky people. I can see why it upsets you. I walk down a London street and think “How lucky we are that the ever present helicopters are not bombing us” not “I’m living in a fascist state”. I would say we are living in an increasingly autocratic surveillance state, with far too much power devolving to the police and rigged parliamentary committees, which is wickedly complicit in the deaths of countless people abroad, myself.
That’s why when I see mass peaceful protests, I tend to think governments should listen, on the whole.
eddie:
I didn’t say that i agreed with the US involvement in Afghanistan in the late eighties. However, they were involved and they should have provided the same support after the war was over that they provided when the Russians were there. Afghanistan was in ruins and with no real leadership but the US government didn’t care as they had achieved their objectives.
Ah, so when you say the US “created” the Taliban, what you really mean is that they foolishly created the conditions in which the taliban could organise and rise to prominence. I can accept that, but to say that they created them is like saying that a cow has created the flies buzzing round its arse.
Chris – again I agree! By and large I think that western governments (or preferably the UN) should intervene if they have the power to do so and if, on the balance of probabilities, the intervention is likely to do more good than harm in the long run. Rwanda is a classic example of where we should have intervened sooner and with more force. Iraq is probably another where our intervention is/was justified in the long run (stands back again and waits for another onslaught).
technicolour,
please read what is said before responding.
“I accept that this does not justify the attacks”: that was a very specific reference to eddie and his detractors. It’s kinda simple if you bother to read it. But, like eddie, you choose only to see the words you want to see rather than what is there. Selective quotation is a less than noble art. My other references to eddie covered a long period when he has quite deliberately been obtuse. But, and I will say it again, this does not justify the attacks. It may help explain them but it doesn’t justify them…. okay?
There is a very determined effort by eddie/technicolour/chris to prevent any kind of coherent alternative version of what is going on in Iran informing the minds of casual visitors to this site.
Are You Ready For War With Demonized Iran?
By Paul Craig Roberts (ex-Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during Reagan years)
June 16, 2009 “Information Clearing House”
— How much attention do elections in Japan, India, Argentina, or any other country, get from the US media? How many Americans and American journalists even know who is in political office in other countries besides England, France, and Germany? Who can name the political leaders of Switzerland, Holland, Brazil, Japan, or even China?
Yet, many know of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. The reason is obvious. He is daily demonized in the US media.
The US media’s demonization of Ahmadinejad itself demonstrates American ignorance. The President of Iran is not the ruler. He is not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He cannot set policies outside the boundaries set by Iran’s rulers, the ayatollahs who are not willing for the Iranian Revolution to be overturned by American money in some color-coded “revolution.”
Iranians have a bitter experience with the United States government. Their first democratic election, after emerging from occupied and colonized status, in the 1950s was overturned by the US government. The US government installed in place of the elected candidate a dictator who tortured and murdered dissidents who thought Iran should be an independent country and not ruled by an American puppet.
The US “superpower” has never forgiven the Iranian Islamic ayatollahs for the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s, which overthrew the US puppet government and held hostage US embassy personnel, regarded as “a den of spies,” while Iranian students pieced together shredded embassy documents that proved America’s complicity in the destruction of Iranian democracy.
The government-controlled US corporate media, a Ministry of Propaganda, has responded to the re-election of Ahmadinejad with non-stop reports of violent Iranians protests to a stolen election. A stolen election is presented as a fact, even thought there is no evidence whatsoever. The US media’s response to the documented stolen elections during the George W. Bush/Karl Rove era was to ignore the massive documented evidence of real stolen elections.
Leaders of the American puppet states of Great Britain and Germany have fallen in line with the American psychological warfare operation. The discredited British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, expressed his “serious doubt” about Ahmadinejad’s victory to a meeting of European Union ministers in Luxembourg. Miliband, of course, has no source of independent information. He is simply following Washington’s instructions and relying on unsupported claims by the defeated candidate preferred by the US Government.
Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, had her arm twisted, too. She called in the Iranian ambassador to demand “more transparency” on the elections.
Even the American left-wing has endorsed the US government’s propaganda. Writing in The Nation, Robert Dreyfuss presents the hysterical views of one Iranian dissident as if they are the definitive truth about “the illegitimate election,” terming it “a coup d’etat.”
What is the source of the information for the US media and the American puppet states?
Nothing but the assertions of the defeated candidate, the one America prefers.
However, there is hard evidence to the contrary. An independent, objective poll was conducted in Iran by American pollsters prior to the election. The pollsters, Ken Ballen of the nonprofit Center for Public Opinion and Patrick Doherty of the nonprofit New America Foundation, describe their poll results in the June 15 Washington Post. The polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and was conducted in Farsi “by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award.” – You can find their report here
The poll results, the only real information we have at this time, indicate that the election results reflect the will of the Iranian voters. Among the extremely interesting information revealed by the poll is the following:
“Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin — greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election.
“While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad’s principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran’s provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.
“The breadth of Ahmadinejad’s support was apparent in our pre-election survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi
“Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.
“The only demographic groups in which our survey found Mousavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of Iranians were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.”
There have been numerous news reports that the US government has implemented a program to destabilize Iran. There have been reports that the US government has financed bombings and assassinations within Iran. The US media treats these reports in a braggadocio manner as illustrations of the American Superpower’s ability to bring dissenting countries to heel, while some foreign media see these reports as evidence of the US government’s inherent immorality.
Pakistan’s former military chief, General Mirza Aslam Beig, said on Pashto Radio on Monday, June 15, that undisputed intelligence proves the US interfered in the Iranian election. “The documents prove that the CIA spent 400 million dollars inside Iran to prop up a colorful but hollow revolution following the election.”
The success of the US government in financing color revolutions in former Soviet Georgia and Ukraine and in other parts of the former Soviet empire have been widely reported and discussed, with the US media treating it as an indication of US omnipotence and natural right and some foreign media as a sign of US interference in the internal affairs of other countries. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that Mir Hossein Mousavi is a bought and paid for operative of the US government.
We know for a fact that the US government has psychological warfare operations that target both Americans and foreigners through the US and foreign media. Many articles have been published on this subject.
Think about the Iranian election from a common sense standpoint. Neither myself nor the vast majority of readers are Iranian experts. But from a common sense standpoint, if your country was under constant threat of attack, even nuclear attack, from two countries with much more powerful military establishments, as is Iran from the US and Israel, would you desert your country’s best defender and elect the preferred candidate of the US and Israel?
Do you believe that the Iranian people would have voted to become an American puppet state?
Iran is an ancient and sophisticated society. Much of the intellectual class is secularized. A significant, but small, percentage of the youth has fallen in thrall to Western sexual promiscuity, to personal pleasure, and to self-absorption. These people are easily organized with American money to give their government and Islamic constraints on personal behavior the bird.
The US government is taking advantage of these westernized Iranians to create a basis for discrediting the Iranian election and the Iranian government.
On June 14, the McClatchy Washington Bureau, which sometimes attempts to report the real news, acquiesced to Washington’s psychological warfare and declared: “Iran election result makes Obama’s outreach efforts harder.” What we see here is the raising of the ugly head of the excuse for “diplomatic failure,” leaving only a military solution.
As a person who has seen it all from inside the US government, I believe that the purpose of the US government’s manipulation of the American and puppet government media is to discredit the Iranian government by portraying the Iranian government as an oppressor of the Iranian people and a frustrater of the Iranian people’s will. This is how the US government is setting up Iran for military attack.
With the help of Mousavi, the US government is creating another “oppressed people,” like Iraqis under Saddam Hussein, who require American blood and treasure to liberate. Has Mousavi, the American candidate in the Iranian election who was roundly trounced, been chosen by Washington to become the American puppet ruler of Iran?
The great macho superpower is eager to restore its hegemony over the Iranian people, thus settling the score with the ayatollahs who overthrew American rule of Iran in 1978.
That is the script. You are watching it every minute on US television.
There is no end of “experts” to support the script. For one example among hundreds, we have Gary Sick, appropriately named, who formerly served on the National Security Council and currently teaches at Columbia University:
“If they’d been a little more modest and said Ahmadinejad had won by 51 percent,” Sick said, Iranians might have been dubious but more accepting. But the government’s assertion that Ahmadinejad won with 62.6 percent of the vote, “is not credible.”
“I think,” continued Sick, “it does mark a real transition point in the Iranian Revolution, from a position of claiming to have its legitimacy based on the support of the population, to a position that has increasingly relied on repression. The voice of the people is ignored.”
The only hard information available is the poll referenced above. The poll found that Ahmadinejad was the favored candidate by a margin of two to one.
But as in everything else having to do with American hegemony over other peoples, facts and truth play no part. Lies and propaganda rule.
Consumed by its passion for hegemony, America is driven to prevail over others, morality and justice be damned. This world-threatening script will play until America bankrupts itself and has so alienated the rest of the world that it is isolated and universally despised.
Please note that Chris and chris, glasgow are not the same person…..
No, Eddie, the analogy would be if the cow deliberately picked the most unpleasant and vicious of the flies, with a particularly nasty sting, a horsefly, say, and armed it with a surface to air missile.
Chris: OK, OK! You just appeared to have changed your mind by the end there (and I didn’t quote you!) But peace, bro.
technicolour,
fair enough…. and peace to you. I hate the bile that is so often spilled across the internet. It is sad that people (me sometimes included – much to my shame) lapse into language that they would not use if they were facing the object of their ire face to face. It is all to easy to hide behind a keyboard and the anonymity of a user name. I don’t agree with all that eddie says but I would defend until death his right to say it.
“There is a very determined effort by eddie/technicolour/chris to prevent any kind of coherent alternative version of what is going on in Iran informing the minds of casual visitors to this site.”
That was not what this thread was about. You should have read what Craig wrote and not decided to use this thread as a platform for you view regarding the current situation in Iran. What you are talking about may be correct but then again it maybe wrong that’s not the point.
Anonymous I would like to ask you, in relation to the thread, do you discount Set B and believe in Set A? Or like me do you believe in both Sets.
@Chris
This is the brain farts of a reactionary;
“”I think we are lucky that we can complain against our government without the fear of death when we believe that they are wrong and that our country accepts people for who they are not what they are. It’s a luxury that we should never forget.””
=====
Iranians are enjoying their freedom of action in the streets, and no they are not Catteled in, or face the vicious and systematic violence of SPG now re-branded as TSG to arrest these en mass, or have the anti terror laws invoked, as it happened in the puny and sanctioned G20 protests, and etc. In Iran they can get on with running amok as good as they like, to remind the government who is the boss. But hey morons like you would never understand that, would they?
Mugabe!! Anyone whom invokes this witchcraft of the British Media is truly a brainless moron!
Chris, we’ve had this problem before on another thread on this site. That’s why i added Glasgow. Nice name by the way!!!
Anonymous: I agree I am possibly not contributing to a “clear alternative picture of what is going on in Iran”. I was rather more hoping to learn.